{"author":"William S. Burroughs","author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs","total_quotes":116,"quotes":[{"text":"The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["man","magic","care "],"id":938,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"},{"text":"Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["death","murder"],"id":3057,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"},{"text":"Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["bureau","bureaucracy","bureaucratization","bureaucrats","cancer"],"id":4629,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"},{"text":"I had the feeling that all over America such stupid arguments were taking place on street corners and in bars and restaurants. All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say 'I don't take any shit!' and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["america","americans"],"id":7864,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"},{"text":"The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["education","knowledge","values "],"id":10001,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"},{"text":"No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["freedom","thought "],"id":10782,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"},{"text":"The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["creativity"],"id":11014,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"},{"text":"I knew that I no longer wanted to take junk. If I could have made one decision, it would have been no more junk, ever, but when it came to the process of quitting I did not have the drive. It gave me a terrible feeling of helplessness to watch myself break every schedule I set up, as though I did not have control over my actions.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["addiction"],"id":12552,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"},{"text":"The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["cats","love"],"id":16032,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"},{"text":"That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["sad"],"id":23163,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":116,"pages":12,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}